Saturday, June 29, 2019

Taking On The Lefty Valley Social Censors: A New "Free Speech Web"

This is big.

Gab.com has just announced it is planning to migrate its entire codebase (including all followers and posts) to the open-source Mastodon/Activity Pub framework next week, on July 4th.
The new Gab.com software - which is called Gab Social - will allow anyone, whether they have a Gab account or not, to set up their own social networking server. All Gab Social servers will be interconnected. Users from one can follow users from another, and receive their content in feeds on their own servers.

Gab.com will be the company's Gab Social server and it expects to be the center of gravity for the Gab Social universe.

Users from Gab's server can follow users from other Gab Social servers, or create their own if they wish.

The firm writes:

In other words: the Gab Social platform will become unstoppable and spread across thousands of servers around the world one day soon.

Gab Social servers can also interconnect with other projects and apps in what is known the Fediverse, a collection of platforms that are all built on top of the same open source social networking protocols.

Long story short, Gab users will, in short order, be able to connect and interact with millions of new people, and vice-versa. Developers can now build apps for the Fediverse that will allow people to circumvent censorship in the closed, monopolistic App Store ecosystems to access Gab Social servers around the world. And the Free Speech Web will become that much more resilient and antifragile as a result.

Gab's philosophy:

Gab.com has one principal moderation rule: regardless of whether Gab.com's administrators, outside activist pressure groups, "cancel culture" Internet mobs, foreign governments, or any other persons agree with any user's political viewpoints, any user's political speech that is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution will be allowed on the site.